The Curse.

The Curse
by james bezerra



Only the little girl had survived the curse.


Her father had died decades ago.


Fathers can never be young in the memories of children, but she kept a picture from the expedition on her nightstand and he looked so young there.


She wasn’t a little girl anymore and not all of her moments were entirely lucid anymore. Some nights she would roll onto her side and look at the picture, just study it as if it were something new that had appeared there. A tall and slender man with neat black hair and a thin moustache, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips. His hands gently gripping the small shoulders of the little girl who stood in front of him. Who would take such a little girl to such a desolate end of the earth? Both of them smiling widely out from the picture frame as the excavation site loomed in the background. Big skeletal scaffolds and ropes and the blur shadows of the dark-skinned locals who did the actual excavating.


He was an attractive young man, the little girl thought with her head pressed comfortably into her pillow. He reminds me of someone …


The days were better for her than the nights. Her mind seemed to work more easily in the daylight. Each morning she would brush out her thinning white hair and as she left the bedroom to go down for tea she would say back to the photo, “Good morning Daddy.”


She read The Times of London while Marjorie rolled the tea cart into the sunroom. More dead in the western Somali deserts, but she had to go far into the paper to find that news. It had become her habit as an adult to follow the news from east Africa. She felt some guilt about it all. The curse was not localized there, but those hundreds of natives must have all carried a germ of it after the expedition. When they had all returned to their homes and their families, the curse had gone with them and then it must have spread like a contagious. It must have spread with every hug of homecoming, every kiss on the cheek of a wife, every pat on the head of a child. It had ravaged that whole continent, as far as the little girl was concerned.


It had not stopped there.


Bromwich, her father’s faithful sidekick and the excavation’s foreman, was shot dead in a Cairo street fourteen years after they had opened the tomb, purportedly over a gambling debt, which would not have been out of character for Bromwich.


Jianxing, her father’s lifelong valet, died of typhoid 35 years after they pried the final stone away from the burial chamber. He’d retired back to his ancestral village on the Kowloon Peninsula after the cancer took the little girl’s father.


Jagdish, who worked as their translator and local palm-greaser - and who always offered her sweet dates from a blue metal tin - was killed in the desert by bandits less than a year after he’d followed her father down into that ancient burial chamber.


Even Zisfain fell victim. Always her father’s shadow, he had ostensibly been only their armourer. In actuality, the little girl knew now, he had been their hawkish protector. Zisfain, whose bloody reputation, it was rumored, stretched all the way back to the Second Boer War. Zisfain, whose quiet had always unnerved her, whose eyes had never betrayed a thing, whose thin lips seemed to have no color to them at all. Zisfain who was still only ever spoken of in hushed tones or - preferably - not spoken of at all. Zisfain who, when a native laborer had been half-crushed by a cave-in, killed the man with a single quick blow of a pickax to the forehead. Quite antithetically, Zisfain had been killed in a car accident in Paris. Perhaps even the curse had been a little afraid of him, and so had chosen to ambush him with a lorry at night on the rain-choked Rue de Seine.


She heard Marjorie returning, “More tea mum?”


“Oh no, no thank you Marjorie. I have to attend services this morning, for Colonel Hardaker. Remember to set out my father’s watch. It was a gift from the Colonel. I’d like to give it to the Colonel’s son.”


“Yes mum.”


Hardaker was the last of them to fall to the curse. She’d never believed the adoption stories that her mother told anyone who would listen. Elliot had her father’s soft and expressive brown eyes. Her father had always treated Elliot like a son - which everyone knew that he actually was - but had never, insofar as she knew, acknowledged him as such. She remembered so clearly how big fat Bromwich used to bounce Elliot on a knee while the little boy hooted and laughed and pretended to be riding a horse. “Giddy up! Giddy up!” Mother had been incensed that Father would take such a little boy to the godless edge of Africa.


The curse had finally gotten to him too. Some eighty-five years on from the opening of the tomb. He’d been a fine man and a caring half-brother and he’d distinguished himself in her Majesty’s Royal Marines. He’d lived well. He’d married and had children and those children had their own children. It had been a good and worthy life, but nothing could stop the curse. It laid its dark grip on his heart just four nights ago when Elliot had stopped breathing in his sleep.


Now she was the only one of them left.


The little girl folded The Times and laid it down on the tea tray. She turned her attention to the bright and crisp morning beyond the glass of the sunroom. How will it come for me? she wondered to herself.


She had only ever spoken out loud about the curse once. In her father’s final days, when it was clear to everyone what was happening, when it was obvious that his end was near, she’d sat right there in the sunroom and held her hand out to Elliot, who had only been a Captain at the time. He’d taken her hand in his and given it a little squeeze. “I suppose we all knew this day was coming,” she’d said to him.


“The cigarettes,” Elliot had said, “Always with those hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes.”


The little girl had looked at him intently, “No. I mean the curse, of course.”


Then Elliot had said back, “What curse?”








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